Led Zeppelin How The West Was Won Deluxe Box Set REVIEW #ledzeppelin #review #vinyl
30Reviewing the deluxe How The West Was Won live album released by Led Zeppelin in 2018, with the original album release in 2003.
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The group comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. With a heavy, guitar-driven sound, they are cited as one of the progenitors of hard rock and heavy metal, although their style drew from a variety of influences, including blues and folk music. Led Zeppelin have been credited as significantly impacting the nature of the music industry, particularly in the development of album-oriented rock (AOR) and stadium rock.
Originally named the New Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin signed a deal with Atlantic Records that gave them considerable artistic freedom. Initially unpopular with critics, they achieved significant commercial success with eight studio albums over ten years. Their 1969 debut, Led Zeppelin, was a top-ten album in several countries and featured such tracks as "Good Times Bad Times", "Dazed and Confused" and "Communication Breakdown". Led Zeppelin II (1969) was their first number-one album, and yielded "Whole Lotta Love" and "Ramble On". In 1970, they released Led Zeppelin III which featured "Immigrant Song". Their untitled fourth album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV (1971), is one of the best-selling albums in history with 37 million copies sold. The album includes "Black Dog", "Rock and Roll" and "Stairway to Heaven", with the latter being among the most popular and influential works in rock history. Houses of the Holy (1973) yielded "The Song Remains the Same" and "Over the Hills and Far Away". Physical Graffiti (1975), a double album, featured "The Rover" and "Kashmir".
Page wrote most of Led Zeppelin's music, particularly early in their career, while Plant wrote most of the lyrics. Jones's keyboard-based compositions later became central to their music, which featured increasing experimentation. The latter half of their career saw a series of record-breaking tours that earned the group a reputation for excess and debauchery. Although they remained commercially and critically successful, their touring and output, which included Presence (1976) and In Through the Out Door (1979), grew limited, and the group disbanded following Bonham's death in 1980, feeling that they would not be "Led Zeppelin" without him.
Led Zeppelin are one of the best-selling music artists of all time; their total record sales are estimated to be between 200 and 300 million units worldwide. They achieved eight consecutive UK number-one albums and six number-one albums on the US Billboard 200, with five of their albums certified Diamond in the US by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Rolling Stone magazine described them as "the heaviest band of all time", "the biggest band of the Seventies", and "unquestionably one of the most enduring bands in rock history". They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995; the museum's biography of the band states that they were "as influential" during the 1970s as the Beatles were during the 1960s.
How the West Was Won is a live triple album by the English rock group Led Zeppelin, released by Atlantic Records on compact disc on 27 May 2003, DVD-Audio on 7 October 2003 and Blu-ray audio in 2018. The recordings are taken from two 1972 performances in California during their tour of North America: L.A. Forum (25 June 1972) and Long Beach Arena (27 June 1972).
Guitarist Jimmy Page considers Led Zeppelin at this point to have been at their artistic peak, as is mentioned in the album's liner notes and in an interview he gave to The Times newspaper in 2010.
For many years, recordings of these two shows circulated only in the form of bootlegs, such as Burn Like a Candle. Though soundboard recordings of Led Zeppelin concerts were circulated among fans after being stolen from Page's personal archive in the mid-1980s, no such versions of the 1972 Long Beach or LA Forum shows were taken, meaning How the West Was Won was the first chance fans had of hearing the soundboard versions of these concerts. The songs from the two shows underwent extensive editing and audio engineering by Page at Island Studios in London before being released on the album.
"It wasn't in our thoughts to try and outdo The Song Remains the Same…" remarked engineer Kevin Shirley. "The reason those performances still stand up now is because Jimmy really was a genius. He could create tempests, summon storms. He really was the master of light and shade. And the musicians around him allowed him to flesh out that vision. Especially John Bonham, without whom Jimmy and Zeppelin would never have been able to do what he did."
The album was remastered and reissued on 23 March 2018 in many formats, including 3CD, 4LP, Blu-Ray Audio and a Super Deluxe Edition box set.